1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to protocol aware applications and more particularly to enabling connectivity for protocol aware applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Protocol aware applications are applications which are configured for operation in a computing environment utilizing a specific communications protocol for exchanging information. In the prototypical example, a protocol aware application is one that communicates with resources and other applications in a computing environment using a pre-established communications protocol. In consequence, a tight coupling can be achieved between the application and low level communications services in the computing environment. In this regard, data exchanged between remote connections can be formatted specifically for the known protocol according to the program code of the application.
Protocol aware applications thrived for years in the pre-Internet era of the sessions based inter-process communications of which the Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is representative. In SNA, clusters of computing resources can be communicatively linked for interoperability utilizing token ring network technologies. A protocol-aware application common in SNA included a network control program (NCP) configured to route data according to the token ring protocol. Notwithstanding, the advent of the Internet and the adoption of Ethernet and the transport control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) has given rise to a need to adapt legacy protocol aware applications to new protocols for different topologies.
It is desirable, however, to adapt protocol aware applications to new computing topologies without necessitating wholesale modifications to the protocol aware applications so as to preserve existing investments in computing technologies. For example, routing applications for legacy mainframe systems maintain a close awareness of the underlying network topology in which the mainframe systems operate. Yet, as legacy mainframe systems are incorporated in modern, TCP/IP network environments, it remains desirable to leverage existing, protocol aware applications like routing applications without requiring a complete recoding of the routing applications. In this way, the routing applications can account for the different network topologies communicatively coupled to the routing applications without experiencing a complete recoding.